Getting Started with .NET Core

.NET core is really easy to get up and running. Download the installer relevant to your environment from https://www.microsoft.com/net/download/core An IDE such as Visual Studio is optional. I’m going to start with the command line version as it’s really quick to get running. It also doesn’t need much resources for a development environment, which is great as I’m currently using a Samsung Tablet with 2 Gig of RAM to write this blog post.

There is a “Current” and a “LTS” version. Choose which version suites your support needs. “LTS” versions are supported for 3 years. “Current” is the latest version, and is supported for 3 months. I’m going to use “Current” here as it contains all the new juicy bits.

.NET Core Installer

The installer will take a minute or two to run. Once installed, the executable “dotnet” will be added to the path. Also different version of .NET will be installed side by side.

To create a new app, there’s a “new” command. On first execution it will extract and expand, which may take a moment.

Welcome to .NET Core!
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Learn more about .NET Core @ https://aka.ms/dotnet-docs. Use dotnet --help to see available commands or go to https://aka.ms/dotnet-cli-docs.
Telemetry
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The .NET Core tools collect usage data in order to improve your experience. The data is anonymous and does not include commandline arguments. The data is collected by Microsoft and shared with the community.
You can opt out of telemetry by setting a DOTNET_CLI_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT environment variable to 1 using your favorite shell.
You can read more about .NET Core tools telemetry @ https://aka.ms/dotnet-cli-telemetry.
Configuring...
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A command is running to initially populate your local package cache, to improve restore speed and enable offline access. This command will take up to a minute to complete and will only happen once.
Decompressing 100% 2294 ms
Expanding 100% 4502 ms

By default, the “dotnet new” command will create a console app. Issuing a “dotnet restore” command, all required packages will be fetched.

There are various project types: console, web, lib and xunittest. The type can be specified with the -t parameter. The language can be specified with the -l parameter. The available languages are C# and F#